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Mark Curtis, the co-founder and director of Declassified UK, has published today another powerful research report on the Declassified UK website
Britain’s state sponsored and funded public service broadcaster, the BBC “is keeping us in the dark about UK support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, Mark Curtis reveals.”
During the following video discussion, Mark provides an overview of his new report which I have reproduced below.
I recommend reading Mark’s full report as follows.
A pro-Palestine protest outside the BBC. (Photo: Monica Wells / Alamy)
Declassified researched the BBC’s online coverage of 16 aspects of UK policy towards Israel and the pro-Israel lobby.
“It is high time for the corporation to be truly held to account and be reformed in the public interest”, leading media professor says.
The BBC is failing to report the various ways in which the UK government has supported Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, Declassified’s new analysis finds.
Our research into the BBC’s written outputs since October 2023 finds the corporation has mainly not reported at all the major ways the UK government has been working with Israel.
It found that the BBC has reported just four times in 15 months that the Royal Air Force (RAF) has been conducting surveillance flights over Gaza.
Only one BBC report on the subject has been written since December 2023, despite the fact that hundreds of such spy missions have been conducted, almost daily, in aid of Israeli intelligence.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says these flights are solely to aid the rescue of hostages held by Hamas. Only one BBC online report mentions the UK may be providing targeting information to Israel or flying weapons to the country.
None of the articles otherwise raise concerns about the UK being willing to collaborate militarily with Israel at a time it is devastating Gaza.
Omitting the news
When Israel’s chief of staff, General Herzi Halevi, was allowed to attend a British military meeting in London last November, this also went unreported by the BBC in its written outputs.
Halevi’s visit was highly controversial, given he has led Israeli military operations throughout its destruction of Gaza. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant are wanted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.
Our research also finds that the BBC has never reported that the British military has been training Israeli armed forces personnel in the UK during the Gaza war.
Last February, the MoD admitted in parliament there were six Israeli military officers posted in the UK. The Labour government has refused to provide further details.
In June last year, the New York Timesreported that a British intelligence collection team had been present in Israel “throughout the war”, ostensibly assisting Israeli intelligence in collecting information related to the hostages.
This information has not been reported by the BBC.
Neither has the key background to Britain’s military support to Israel. This derives from a Roadmap agreement signed between the two countries a few months before the Hamas attacks of October 2023.
The accord committed the two states “to tackle shared threats” as part of a “close strategic partnership, with extensive defence and security cooperation”.
Another key document is a secret military accord signed by the UK and Israel in December 2020, which was mentioned on social media by Israel but which the UK government has long refused to publish.
We could find no evidence that BBC journalists have reported either of these two key documents in the corporation’s online news.
In sharp contrast to other UK government policies concerning Israel, the BBC has published many articles mentioning British arms exports to Israel.
In these reports, the BBC has occasionally cited concerns by human rights groups and MPs about the possible use by Israel of these arms, at the same time as citing pro-Israel figures.
However, article headlines have rarely been critical of these weapons sales.
The only overtly disapproving headlines Declassified could find were: ‘Brother of aid worker killed in Gaza criticises arming Israel’ and ‘Amnesty criticises ministers for arms firms funding’.
Another headline was: ‘Foreign Office official resigned over Israel arms sales’.
By contrast, many headlines are conciliatory towards Israel. These include:
‘UK defends partial Israel arms ban as Netanyahu calls it “shameful”’
‘UK ban on selling arms to Israel would benefit Hamas, says Cameron’
‘Boris Johnson: Shameful to call for UK to end arms sales to Israel’
‘Deputy PM: It’s still legal for the UK to sell arms to Israel’
There are no headlines about the possible use of UK arms by Israel in Gaza, or any directly reflecting the repeated calls by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, to halt all UK arms exports and military assistance to Israel.
The prominent legal action against the government for arming Israel brought by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), the Global Legal Action Network and Al-Haq, has been ignored by the BBC. Declassified could find no BBC written coverage of this at all.
The most prominent group challenging British arms exports, the Campaign Against Arms Trade, has been mentioned six times on the BBC website in 15 months.
Declassified has uncovered three other disturbing aspects of Britain’s arming of Israel, none of which appears to have been covered by the BBC.
These include Britain continuing to provide military equipment to Israel after announcing limited sanctions last September, and allowing UK airspace to be used to supply weapons to Israel.
Also unreported by the BBC is that the UK has been sending components for F-35 warplanes to the US, where they can be then exported to Israel.
How the BBC is covering up UK support of Israel
Voluntary censorship
Neither has the BBC covered the possible role of UK spy agency GCHQ or the army’s special forces, the SAS, in facilitating Israeli military operations.
These are live issues given that GCHQ operates an extensive intelligence operation on Cyprus, from where the RAF planes are flown over Gaza.
GCHQ is known to have aided past Israeli combat operations in Gaza. Yet Declassified could find no reports on the BBC website mentioning GCHQ in the context of Gaza.
Reporting on the SAS was subject by the government to a D-Notice – a voluntary gagging order not to publish ‘sensitive’ information concerning ‘national security’- in October 2023.
It followed reporting by the Mail that an SAS team was positioned on Cyprus, reportedly to help rescue British hostages held by Hamas.
Since then, it appears the entire UK national media, including the BBC, has complied with this. The BBC has no articles covering or speculating on an SAS role in Israel or Gaza.
Unreported collusion
There are other ways in which the British government is in effect colluding with Israel which have gone unreported by the BBC.
Perhaps incredibly, the BBC has not reported in its written outputs since October 2023 that the UK is engaged in negotiations with Israel to secure a free trade agreement.
Conservative and Labour ministers have since 2022 held five rounds of talks with the Israeli government, whose economy minister, Nir Barkat, is an outspoken supporter of its attacks on Palestinians.
Jonathan Reynolds, the current trade minister pursuing the prospective new deal, is a recipient of funding from Britain’s Israel lobby.
Neither has the BBC reported on the arrests by the UK authorities of pro-Palestinian journalists in Britain.
In October last year, officers from the Metropolitan Police raided the home of Asa Winstanley, a well-known pro-Palestinian journalist with the Electronic Intifada, and seized his devices under provisions of the UK’s Terrorism Act.
This failed to concern the BBC, as has the similar use of anti-terror laws by the authorities to try to silence other pro-Palestinian voices in recent months.
Neither has any effort been made by BBC journalists to highlight the influence in the UK parliament exercised by the Israel lobby, notably Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI).
This is a major gap in reporting since these are among the largest lobbying forces in British politics, funding dozens of MPs to go on “fact-finding” visits to Israel.
CFI has been mentioned five times, LFI six times, in BBC reporting in the past 15 months.
In no article has the BBC flagged the possible influence of these groups over parliament or government policy-making.
Indeed, in the BBC’s written news outputs, the Israel lobby appears not to exist at all: the term ‘Israel lobby’ has been used just once in quote marks.
Yet Declassified found that a third of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet, and no less than a quarter of UK MPs overall, have been funded by pro-Israel groups, including LFI.
In one article, the BBC reported that former foreign minister Sir Alan Duncan was under investigation by the Conservatives for saying that CFI was “doing the bidding” of the Israeli prime minister.
This was followed by the report stating that “The Campaign Against Antisemitism said he was ‘invoking classic antisemitic tropes of Jewish power and disloyalty’”.
Duncan was later cleared by the Conservatives, but the BBC did not report this online.
‘National scandal’
Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, said: “The BBC is clearly utterly failing to inform the public about how the UK military and government is complicit in the horrors of Gaza. This is a national scandal, showing how far away the corporation is from being a public service broadcaster.”
He added: “The BBC’s failure to accurately report on Israel’s genocide in Gaza is as much to do with what it refuses to report as with what it does report. It is high time for the corporation to be truly held to account and be reformed in the public interest”.
“Mainstream media like the BBC will never meaningfully challenge those governments who are aiding the destruction of Gaza because they are overwhelmingly tied to existing foreign policy interests that see Israel as a crucial watchdog for Western power in the region.”
A BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC News teams are editorially independent and make their own decisions about what to cover and how to cover it.
“We have reported the Gaza-Israel conflict in great depth and consistently across our programmes and services since 7 October 2023, ensuring audiences are kept updated with the latest developments as well as providing comprehensive analysis.
“We hold ourselves to the highest journalistic standards and have reported the conflict impartially – without fear or favour.”
Notes:
BBC online coverage under the tag ‘Israel-Gaza war’ amounted to over 1,000 articles from April 2024 to January 2025 alone.
Research on the bbc.co.uk website was conducted for the period 7 October 2023 to 5 January 2025.
Mark is the author of five books about British foreign policy, including Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses and, most recently, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam. These books, which have drawn on the British declassified documents, have been widely acclaimed as uncovering numerous hidden episodes in the UK’s post-1945 foreign policy and for rewriting the true history of Britain’s role in the world in this period.
Mark is a former Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and was visiting fellow at the Institut Français des Relations Internationales in Paris and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik in Bonn. He is a graduate of Goldsmiths’ College, University of London and postgraduate of the London School of Economics.
Mark has written as a freelance journalist for various media for 30 years. He also worked in the international development NGO world for 25 years. He was previously director of the World Development Movement (now Global Justice Now) and head of policy at the international NGOs, ActionAid and Christian Aid. From 2005-18 Mark managed Curtis Research, his own research consultancy covering international development and foreign policy issues. He conducted field research in 15 African countries, visiting the continent 50 times, and produced over 130 reports for over 40 NGOs.
After reading Mark’s excellent article, it popped into my head to do a quick search of the BBC to check something. Lo and behold they actually did publish two reports about the horrific wholesale slaughter of six year old Hind Rajab and six of her relatives who were attempting to escape from Gaza with Hind’s uncle driving his car.
Below is a photo of dear Hind “courtesy of Ghada Ageel” via Al Jazeera’s excellent investigative report, Hind Rajab: Were Israeli troops around where the six-year-old was killed? published February 26, 2024. Until it was proved otherwise, including by Forensic Architecture, the Israeli army had of course initially denied that any of their troops and/or tanks were anywhere near the location where Hind and her six relatives were viciously, lethally attacked.
Hind’s mother had thought her young daughter would be more safe escaping from Gaza with her uncle and his family. However, after unsuccessful attempts to contact her brother operating the escape vehicle, Hind’s mother contacted the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (RCS) in desperation for help. When the RCS was finally able to make contact on Hind’s uncle’s mobile, his 15 year old daughter, Hind’s cousin Layan Hamadeh answered the phone. Some time later the RCS was finally able to speak to dear Hind briefly.
The BBC’s reports about the heinous recorded attack on Hind and her relatives were published five days apart early in February 2024 here and here.
I continue to pray for Hind’s mother and all of the other people who have lost loved ones during Israel’s brutal ongoing indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Gaza. May their dear souls rest in peace. I pray that those who continue to be under attack by the IDF in Gaza will live in safety and finally find peace when a lasting ceasefire becomes a reality. 🙏
![school graduation photo of Hind Rajab [Courtesy of Ghada Ageel]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F16b3cc70-854a-4772-9822-ba01664c37a7_770x513.jpeg "school graduation photo of Hind Rajab [Courtesy of Ghada Ageel]")
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